And I realised: / even in the line to hell, / waiting for punishment, / we'd still reach for chanachur. / We'd still find comfort / in the crunch of survival
It would rain in the rains / And the rest of this poem would be written by someone else
Something you may... You may never find again.
My love always arrived wrapped in silence, wrapped in dust. But that was childhood.
We will make meaning out of the holes in the sun
There’s a purgatorial break between these stretches …flaxen against the lights
I am not a single name. Not a single wound.
Grey chips of rough cement Rust rubble all around,
This was the way it ended: not with fire, But carried quietly under sleep-beds,
She doesn’t need an alarm For the last hour of the night.
Her Kohl-rimmed eyes, dangling earrings,/ The chiffon scarf, the satin silk shirt
It said, my body was no longer needed. / “This is the age of freedom. Let me go, and explore.”
We’re still alive/ but they wanted to die a natural death
Self-confidence shaken, some shattered memories in their side bags
Being a woman comes to me naturally If not me, then who? I was never asked to be one I was never asked to cook
This is a translation by Md. Abu Zafor of Bimal Guha’s “Kalo Biral” from the collection ‘E Kon Matal Nritya' (first published in 2022).
Time to set sail for a new cruise, oh dear voyager Sindbad!
Time, heavy as a thousand suns combined,/ Bends mothers, smaller than the ones they bore,
What’s life if a sense of darkness/ doesn’t connect night to sunlight
